Creating enemies instead of friends

In the media these days, a person finds numerous references to “our enemies.” We read and hear of individuals whose actions give comfort to our enemies. Nations that are building nuclear bombs are our enemies, even though our nation has enough nuclear bombs to wipe out most of humanity. Nations which have different economic and political systems from ours, groups with religious beliefs different from ours, become our enemies.

I’m not aware of any person or group that I regard as my enemy. Oh, certainly there are some individuals with whom I agree more than with others. But just because I disagree with some people doesn’t make them my enemies, people whose views are more conservative than mine, people who have different interests and values than mine, people who do things of which I disapprove. I certainly do not wish them any harm, nor would I personally do anything to harm them.

As a veteran of World War II, I was taught to hate Germans. They were our “enemies.” We were taught to call them “Huns,” “Bosch” and other degrading names. Yet when I was assigned KP duty working side by side with German prisoners of war, somehow they didn’t seem like such evil guys at all. Nowadays, they and their offspring are our “allies.”

Is it that the members of our society who have power and position are those who create our enemies in fear of losing their status and wealth? Do we as a nation need to engage in more efforts toward developing friendship with other nations even if it costs us? If we did, perhaps we could reduce the size of our Defense Department and devote the savings to educating our children, health care, infrastructure and reducing poverty instead of having endless futile wars.